1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of distributing data to the network nodes of a telecommunication network. The present invention further relates to a telecommunication network for implementing the above method.
This application is based on and claims the benefit of European Patent Application No 05291995.8 filed on Sep. 26, 2005, which is incorporated by reference herein.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A telecommunication network generally comprises a plurality of network nodes. Such network nodes are adapted to route and switch traffic flows across the network. In order to perform routing and switching, a network node typically comprises devices such as switches, cross-connects, add-drop multiplexers or the like.
Besides, a node typically comprises a local database, which contains management information (software, metrics, configuration data, scheduling data, logs etc.) for configuring, operating and managing the above devices.
In some cases, it may be required to distribute management information to all the nodes of a network. For instance, when a failure occurs in the network, a management information distribution may be required so that the local database content of each node can be updated/restored.
In the following description and in the claims, the expression “data set” will refer to a set of management information to be distributed to a node, so that the node can store it into its local database, independently from the type and/or content of the management information constituting such a data set (software, metrics, etc.).
Distributing data sets may be performed in a centralised way, all the nodes of a same network being connected (directly or through other nodes) to a network manager.
The network manager sends to each node its respective data set through a dedicated management channel. For instance, in Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) networks, data sets may be transmitted from the network manager through the so-called Data Communication Channel (DCC).
A network manager can simultaneously send to more than one node the respective data sets. The number of nodes that can be updated and/or restored simultaneously depends on the management channel bandwidth and on the data set size. In some cases, the management channel bandwidth can be rather narrow (for instance, 176 kbit/s for the above cited DCC). Moreover, the data set size is increasing, due to the increasing complexity of the network nodes and the consequent increasing amount of required management information. Thus, in these cases, only few nodes can be simultaneously updated/restored, thus implying an overall network updating/restoring time (and thus cost) which is often unacceptable.